Earth-Based Telescope Trying Hard, Still Taking Potato-Quality Photos

 

Astronomers and space journalists, huddle up:

We know you're *very* excited about the pictures you've taken of two of Jupiter's moons with an Earth-based telescope. We are too.  Just don't oversell it. These may be the "clearest yet" photos taken of these particular moons from Earth, but as far as clarity goes, they look like most of the photos I've taken of the Moon with my cell phone camera. Nothing to write home about.

I mean, keep working on the technology. Hopefully, Earth-based photos of distant celestial objects will continue to get better over time. Just don't expect the unwashed masses -- and this is coming from a life-long solar exploration nut who cut pictures of the Voyager encounters with Uranus out of the newspaper and pasted them into his journal and got WAY excited last year when he spotted two or three of Jupiter's moons through the eyepiece of his son's $120 telescope -- to get as excited about your potato photos as you are.

And don't tell me you can see any of Europa's famous surface cracks in this photo. Because all I can really see is pixels.

Forever [not] Alone

Just another reminder, as the Earth spins through the void and orbits around the Sun that we are not alone in this little corner of the universe. There's lots of "stuff" out there, just waiting to be discovered. Wouldn't this be a cool place to leave some kind of time capsule, a la Michigan J. Frog? I feel a short story coming on. Or at least a re-read of "The Little Prince."

Enthusiasm

I had a telescope when I was a kid. Got it for Christmas, after a year of serious begging. It was great. I remember setting it up in the living room so I could catch a view of the moon rising over the back yard through the picture window (it was freaking cold outside, you see).

I must have stared at that moon for hours, moving the telescope occasionally to keep up with its movement through the sky, counting craters and watching the edge of the moon wriggle as its light came down to me through the atmosphere and that picture window glass.

Then I put the thing away and, as I recall, never got it out again. Ungrateful little kid that I was.

Now I have a son about that age, and for his birthday this year, we got him a telescope. We’ve had it out several times. Just this weekend we trained it on the moon and counted craters, watched as clouds drifted between us and that shining orb and lamented that I skimped and didn’t buy that moon filter to reduce the eyestrain.

But we got it out several times this year. And the year’s not over yet.

Enthusiasm. Maybe that’s all it takes.

Dad didn’t do this kind of stuff with me. Not that it matters – we did lots of other kinds of stuff together. But getting out that telescope with Liam and looking at the moon through it – and reminding myself that we’re looking at a flipped image; that explains why Crater Tycho was on the top right quadrant of the moon, rather than the lower left – was fun. We did it together. We were both excited.

Excitement is kinda like nuclear criticality – you need a lot of it to keep things going.

A Different Angle

This photo is in the public domain.

At first glance, this photo looks pretty normal. Well, normal enough for a photograph taken of a moon orbiting within the rings of Saturn.

It’s Mimas, with its oblate sphereoid shape showing well in this photo – if you squint at it just right, you can see the moon is slightly egg-shaped.

Then look at the moon on its right side.

Looks kinda flat, right?

You’re not seeing things. It is flat. At least from that angle. What you’re actually seeing is the ridge that rings Crater Herschel, a massive impact crater on the moon’s surface.

The moon itself is only about 400 kilometers across. Herschel is 130 km across – or almost a third of the diameter of the moon.

Here’s a photo with a better view of the crater, taken by Voyager 2. (The first was taken by the Cassini space probe.)

This photo is in the public domain.

I’m currently working on a novel that takes place on one of Saturn’s other moons, Iapetus. I may have to work Mimas into it somehow. Not that Iapetus is a slacker in the weird looks department, either. Behold:

This photo is in the public domain.

It’s got a pretty massive impact crater of its own, plus that odd equatorial ridge that makes the moon look like a walnut.

Ah, the weirdness of space.

More sciencey stuff here.

And here:

This video clip is used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

Beautiful Vistas and Thrilling Bursts of Speed

There's still a big part of me that would love to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To be part of a team that sent a probe to a neighboring planet, to send a probe out to the stars.

NOVA may be the closest I get.

I wanted to be an astronomer, thinking the thoughts Carl Sagan thought as he put together his television show COSMOS. Then I encountered algebra, trigonometry and such in junior high, in high school. The Ds and Fs I got in those subjects, consistently -- I did better in geometry, but I'm at a loss to explain why -- steered me away from that dream.

But I can write. So I've been working on that.

But there are a lot of writers, a lot of science writers, a lot of technical writers, who also want to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so the competition is fierce. And living in Southern California is expensive.

So I can watch these shows. I can read a lot about science, and space exploration. And do my little bit of technical writing for those guys in the Lost River Desert digging up the leftovers of nuclear weapons production.

"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running abound shouting that he's been robbed," says Gordon B. Hinckley, former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages required a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey . . . delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick," he says, "is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride."

These JPL guys in the video know all this. They work through it. As do I. I'm not working at JPL, but I am working on other stuff that takes me, maybe, to those beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed Hinckley talks about.

And go to the stars in my mind, every time I listen to this:

The Brooklyn Space Program

The New York borough of Brooklyn has its own space program.

A group of parents and children, led by Brooklyinite videographer Luke Geissbuhler, successfully sent a homemade capsule containing a high-definition digital camera and an iPhone (acting as a GPS) into space, successfully sending their capsule via weather balloon to a height of nearly 19 miles, or 100,000 feet, and then retrieved their capsule for further experimentation after it landed a mere 30 miles north of its launch site.

Pretty damn cool and, frankly, done at a fraction of the cost of the first space launch. Of course, this team didn't have to design the camera or the location system, and they used ancient analog technology -- a weather balloon -- to launch, but they still had to overcome some pretty interesting engineering problems. Protecting their gear from the altitude and the cold? Hand-warmers and a waterproof capsule. How cool is that?

Well done, crew. I'll follow your further experiments with interest. You can read more about them here.

Time for Lutetia's Close-Up

If you look at one space-based photo a year, please, for 2010, make it this one:

This is a shot of Asteroid Lutetia, shot by the European Space Agency's Rosetta space probe on July 10, as the probe neared the floating bit of space rock. That in of itself is spectacular, though the image is made even more amazing - and a little eerie - with Saturn floating into the probe's field of vision.

There's a lump of rock out there, about 100 kilometers in diameter, floating in the void. It's near enough to the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter to be considered a main belt asteroid, but still, it's in a lonely place out there. Since the dawnna time, it's been floating out there, getting pock-marked and dusty. Maybe, early on, it had a more unique color, but the dust of space has settled there now, thick, painting it a uniform gray, mottled here and there by darker bits and lighter streaks. Pounded by sister hunks of space junk.

Then a little hunk of metal and silicon and glass what whatnot else comes out of the void, speeding towards Lutetia at a phenomenal rate. Little strands of radiation reach out from the little hunk, probing the big hunk, then sending more streams of radiation back somewhere along the route on which it came. In a few scant hours, it's gone from sight, only the slight whisper of its communications and the exhalations from its engines left to mark its passage. Lutetia, alone for eons, is alone again.

Lutetia is one of only a handful of encounters Rosetta will have on its way to its 2014 rendezvous with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. During that encounter, the probe will parallel the comet along its path roughly from the orbit of Jupiter to the comet's closest approach to the Sun. Along the way, it'll drop a probe that'll actually land on the comet's surface. It's pretty much what the Three Amigos did in "Shootin' for Love."

I love these kinds of space missions -- those done just for the sake of science. And for photos like this:

That's Lutetia's dark side, backlit by the Sun. We're so used to seeing crescents that are round all over it's kind of hard to adjust to the thought of a rugged crescent like this one.

I love looking at these photos. All I can think is "Space Potato." That's probably juvenile of me. Now we just need to corral one of these things, hollow it out and build a spaceship inside and we can seed the universe with the nuttiness that is Earth-based humanity.

And here I go again benefitting from the creative energies of others without paying for it. Am I a hypocrite? I suppose I am. They did not make these Star Trek episodes so some wonk can publish them on his blog. Thought maybe I can classify this under the aegis of cultural research. Naw, that seems like a bit of a stretch.

I Want A Moonsicle

NASA photo shows a plume from the LCROSS crash

NASA researchers are all ecstatic this morning, announcing that the LCROSS crash into the Moon on Oct. 9 revealed there is water on the Moon's surface.

Somehow, I feel like this announcement is coming a bit late. After all, science fiction writers from John Christopher to Arthur C. Clarke predicted -- or at least wrote about -- water on the Moon. One has to wonder, however, how Matthew Looney and company feel about the discovery, seeing as they distrust water almost completely, except as a cleanser for murtles. Some of the Moonsters up there are probably still upset about the bad Earther driving, crashing those two satellites into the Moon in the first place. Freeholy has got to be looking better and better.

Yes, I'm babbling.

It's exciting to find water on the Moon. It means available raw material for scientists if we ever get a Moon base going up there. Not that it's going to happen in my lifetime, but a guy can dream. It's like knowing you can go halfway across the Earth and not have to mail yourself cinder blocks in order to start building as soon as you get there.

Moon River

Discoveries announced this week kind of make this song have additional meaning, don't you think?

Of course, that water has been discovered on the Moon doesn't come as a big surprise to me; I'd always assumed water would be found there. It's abundant on Earth, so one could reasonably assume that it would be found on the Moon, since both were created in the same general neighborhood. Comets pounding one object, bringing water from the sky, would tend to pound another object just next door.

Of course, the amounts of water found ont he moon -- 32 ounces in a ton of regolith, they estimate -- is not big. One cannot stick a soda straw in the moon and find a handy drink. But the molecule is there.

So the question remains: What will we do about it? When I was a kid -- and this was at the tail-end of the Apollo program -- I expected there would be moon bases by the turn of the century. I've been a bit disappointed in that regard. Maybe someday . . .

MARS!

The folks at NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Arizona at Tucson have got a treat for space buffs (I typed "space butts" twice before I could get my finger on the "F" key): High-resolution photos of Mars. They're available in the public domain here. They're not necessarily Google Earth high-res, but they're the highest resolution images we've got of the Red Planet, bringing to pass the prophetic and enigmatic saying of Arthur C. Clarke's spaceman in Imperial Earth. His minor character Robert Kleinman, who perished while exploring Saturn, said "Space is small. Only the planets are big." Looking at these images will remind you of that.

Gullies in Hale Crater

No, I have no idea where Hale Crater is. But looking at these photos makes me want to figure it out. It's fascinating to see how similar Mars' landforms are to those we're used to seeing on Earth. It's easy to look at these photos and imagine wind or water creating these forms. Sure, they're landforms you might see in the bleakest portions of the Badlands or the Great Basin, but they're familiar landforms (gullies, dunes, et cetera) that you're used to seeing on Earth.

Ridges in the Northwest Meridiani Planum

I've spent more than a half hour screening the images, and each one seems more fascinating than the next. Tie all this in with Google's ambitious but lower-res Google Mars, and you've got some fun tools to play with. I'm ready to go explore on Mars. NASA, when are you going to take me there?

Methane on Mars

A panorama of the Martian landscape taken by NASA's Spirit rover on Jan. 1, 2006, from the bottom of Gusev Crater.

I first heard this news from England's The Sun newspaper, but wanted to wait until a slightly more reputable source reported on it. I'll have to settle for CNN. But the news is this: Scientists at two Hawaii observatories confirmed today they have discovered methane gas in Mars' atmosphere. This is significant because some scientists believe Martian bacteria could be the source of this methane.

Life on Mars is a possibility.

Of course, so are a lot of other things. Those explaining today's find also point out that geologic processes involving the oxidation of iron can also produces methane as a byproduct, and given that Mars' red color comes from oxidized iron, it's a fair bet that a lot of the Martian methane comes from this and other geologic sources, rather than biologic ones.

Still, it's fascinating to think that a future expedition might find methane-producing microbes on Mars.

No Pee-Wee Galaxy Ours

It appears our own Milky Way Galaxy isn’t as twee as we once believed.

Not that I, nor most of the inhabitants of this planet, for that matter, fret even a little about the size of our galaxy comparative to others in the neighborhood. But, given the trend of late of trimming and reducing the size and quantity of things in our little corner of the universe (I’m still upset about the demotion of Pluto, mind you) it’s heartening to hear that the Milky Way might indeed be as massive as the Andromeda Galaxy, heretofore thought to be the Big Brother in our local galaxial group.

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently completed measurements of the movement of areas of prolific star formation to determine how fast they were moving. They discovered, according to this article, that the Milky Way is spinning at about 600,000 miles per hour, or 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought. Using the arcane voodoo of mathematics, which kept me from my childhood dream of becoming an astronomer, they have determined that, given the faster rotation, the Milky Way must be about 50 percent heavier than previously thought, putting our own galaxy on par with the mass of Andromeda.

Another interesting finding:

Reid and his colleagues found other surprises, too. Measuring the distances to
multiple regions in a single spiral arm allowed them to calculate the angle of
the arm. “These measurements,” Reid said, “indicate that our Galaxy probably has four, not two, spiral arms of gas and dust that are forming stars.” Recent surveys by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that older stars reside mostly in two spiral arms, raising a question of why the older stars don't appear in all the arms. Answering that question, the astronomers say, will require more measurements and a deeper understanding of how the Galaxy works.

So the galaxy isn’t even as boring as once assumed – a mere two-armed bipedal octopus spinning through oblivion.

It’s often been a dream of mine to fly out over the Milky Way and look down at its spinning disk and revel in watching its bright arms spin gently against the blackness of outer space. It’s happened a few times in my dreams – always starting with a gigantic leap from the trampoline in the backyard of my boyhood home, where I soared for a while admiring the stars above, only to turn earthward and admire the roofs of our chicken coop and that of the neighbors’ until I soared higher and higher and higher until the earth was gone and the galaxy’s arms swam beneath me. Then I read that Albert Einstein often wondered what the universe would look like if he could travel through it at the speed of light on a motorcycle. Maybe that’s all it takes – Einstein wasn’t very good at the mathematics, either.

So I’ll keep dreaming about that galaxy of ours. Someday, I’ll see it from the perspective I desire.